I’m Sarah.

After graduating college, I worked as a TV news reporter at an NBC affiliate outside of Chicago. I then retired from that life to be a stay at home mom to my three little ones. While at home I was able to rekindle my love for decorating and crafts. A blog seemed like the perfect place to share those ideas. There is inspiration everywhere, I hope you find some here.

Nov 30 photography 101: {how to take blog pictures}

Taking pictures for my blog is something I do a couple times a week. So I thought I would share some quick and easy tips for how to make your blog pictures stand out. I think I especially think about making my blog pictures stand out because I often submit these posts to link parties and when you have only have a tiny little picture to show off your project, you want that picture to look good so that people will click on it to check it out right?! We bloggers spend so much time on certain projects, it would be a shame to do all of that work and then not have a really nice picture of it that's appealing to your readers.

So here are just a couple of things that have really helped me.

1. Lighting:Good lighting is so important! To get good lighting, there are a few things you can do. Take pictures in well lit areas in your home (or outside) when there is a lot of natural light. Direct sunlight usually isn't the best option because the object will look washed out, so rather, bounce the light off something else like a foam board or white sheet. To get the most natural sunlight, this may mean that you have to reheat last night's amazing dinner so that you can snap a picture during the day. Or save craft projects for Saturday's or the middle of the day instead of evenings. That can be a hassle sometimes, but it is definitely worth it. You can see how worth it is in these two pictures I took of my hot chocolate gift jars. I took the first one at night, and even though I would have been able to increase the exposure and brighten it up in post editing, I still just didn't like it. So I took pictures again the next day in the daylight and didn't have to edit the picture at all. I think there is a definite difference between the two.

2. Backgrounds:In almost every picture I use a piece of foam board, not only does it help to reflect some natural light in the room, it also works as a clean crisp background. This particular piece of foam board in the picture below is bent in half so that I can use it as the background and the bottom of the picture if I want. I always keep a white piece of poster board in my crafting areas so that I can take pictures with clutter free backgrounds. I also bought a couple 1 ft x 1 ft little vinyl squares with wood patterns on them. They are so easy to use and transfer around. And you can put food on it and the food just wipes off because it's vinyl. I found mine on Etsy. You could use material or scrapbook paper for this also.

This is what it would look like if I took the background away. The oranges stand out a lot more when there is a white background behind them.

3. Make the photo interesting:I think it's always fun to use different angles to try and change up the otherwise normal photo. Or to add props to the photo... just make sure the props are relevant.

4. Post editing:There are many different editing programs that can help make your blog pictures just that much better. I like to use Picmonkey for my basic edits. There you can change the exposure, add text, crop, rotate the picture or change it's size. This is where you can make up for any mistakes you made while taking picture, like poor lighting, etc.